To those who had hoped New York would become the 12th state to legalize pot, Heastie said, “in government, people have to realize sometimes you don’t get everything that you want all in one shot.”
Stewart-Cousins, a Westchester Democrat, said she would continue trying to persuade her colleagues to support legalization. She called the decriminalization law “a momentous first step in addressing the racial disparities caused by the war on drugs.”
At the Drug Policy Alliance, which had pushed for legalization, New York State Director Kassandra Frederique said that while the new law would allow deletion of criminal records for about 900,000 low-level marijuana arrests in the past 20 years, it still allowed police to arrest individuals for “wide-ranging instances of marijuana possession.”
Black and Hispanic people “will remain disproportionately in the cross-hairs of harmful enforcement practices,” she said. “Given the extensive, life-changing inequities created by discriminatory and draconian enforcement policies, true justice requires the allocation of tax revenue” to minority communities, which would come through taxation of legal sales, she said.
Although the legalization effort failed, Democrats, who now control both houses of the Legislature, have aggressively and successfully pursued a progressive agenda this session. The lawmakers approved sweeping rental protections over the fierce objections of landlords, and passed a measure allowing undocumented immigrants to obtain drivers licenses. They also strengthened abortion rights and set sharp reductions in the state’s carbon emissions.
--With assistance from Craig Giammona.
This article was provided by Bloomberg News.